the workBench: Copying & Pasting
Copying and Pasting. We just put up two new pages about copying and pasting in the tutorial on building screens. Copying and pasting are mentioned elsewhere, but we have accidentally hidden one of the workBench’s most useful features.Any part of a screen that you are building - a colored box, a text box, an image, a shape like a triangle or arrow, etc. - can be copied and pasted, either into the same screen again or into other screens, even from one project to another.
Image that you’ve made the home page of a project - perhaps a website - and that you have a box with a title at the top of the page, perhaps “Mr. Smith’s Website.” You can select and copy that box, open the next screen in the project, and paste it into the exact same location.Then change the text in the pasted box to describe that second screen, perhaps “English 10,” or “Contact Information.” It’s good design to give people cues as to what screen they are visiting, and it is good to have certain common screen elements, particularly menus and navigational buttons, that look the same throughout your project and that are in the exact same locations on the page. Visitors shouldn’t have to figure out a different scheme for getting around on every screen. (The copy and paste buttons appear on top of the Toolbox, as in the example above.)You can push copying and pasting up one level. Click twice on a screen icon in the Sitemap to open it in the Canvas, then click once on it to select it. It turns red when it is selected. Then you can click on copy at the top of the Toolbox. You can then click on paste to paste a copy of that screen into the Sitemap.Keep in mind that when you paste something into the same location as the original, it is pasted directly on top of the original, so to see it, you need to drag the pasted copy off of the top of the original.Since you can copy and paste a whole screen, you can use any partially created screen as a template, copying and pasting it as many times as you like - great for projects like portfolios that have a basic screen design and some chunk of content that keeps changing. It’s also great for creating and giving younger students partially-build screens, in which they add some simple content, such as a written response.To go to the tutorial pages on copying and pasting, click here.

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